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Richard James Havis

Thames: The Biography 
by Peter Ackroyd 
Nan A. Talese 
HK$320  
Thames is a companion work to  Peter Ackroyd's justly celebrated   London: The Biography. But this paean to London's great river is a markedly different book. Dense with facts, figures,  personages and riverine anecdotes, Thames is more a deep repository of information  than a lucid retelling of its story. 
No thread of the river's history seems to have escaped Ackroyd and his researchers' sharp eyes:  all the threads are  collected within the pages.  A structure as winding as its subject matter adds further challenges for the reader. The book is ultimately saved, of course, by Ackroyd's masterful command of the English language and his customary erudition. But only Ackroyd completists and historians of London's waterways will have the application to finish it.
It would be pleasing to think Ackroyd intentionally set Thames down on the pages in a way that mimics a river gradually winding along to the sea. The story always flows in one general direction but becomes caught in nooks and crannies, or dammed. And like the Thames, the book frequently doubles back on itself. 
Thames (originally published as Thames: Sacred River) is organised in a vaguely thematic way: sections include The Sacred River, The Working River, The River Of Trade and so on. The observations are geographical, literary, mythical, mystical and scientific;  the book contains the variety of intellectual approaches one would expect from Ackroyd. The information accrues  incrementally and it probably doesn't much matter that concentration often wanders from the page. But it is a slow read.
There is much to be scavenged from the varying currents of the text. The history of the Thames and its cultural resonances are linked by those who have lived on its banks, Ackroyd says. In ancient times, the river was a sacred place. 'It is the oldest of all nature's forces,' he writes. 'The holy waters support life and promote fertility as well as destruction.' The river was then unknowable and untamable. But when the Romans invaded Britain they harnessed the Thames' power, using it as an avenue for trade and as a means to military dominance. And by the 16th century it had become a 'river of royal pomp and procession ... the river down which Henry VIII and preeminently Elizabeth I sailed in state'. Ann Boleyn sailed down the Thames to her coronation in  1533. She followed the same route to imprisonment in the Tower before her execution a few years later.
Ackroyd goes on to write about the river's locks, its mills and  bridges. He  features the criminal types,  and the gardens that used to line portions of its banks. He talks about its docks and their cargoes. He lists the types of vessel that have sailed on it: 'The wherries and clinkers, hoys and onkers, house-boats and skiffs, yachts and motor-boats, tilt boats and shallops ...' He recalls those who have died in its waters and the attacks on the river itself during the second world war. All the while, Ackroyd praises the Thames for possessing an immutable beauty that has held fast through time. Once, he notes, whole guidebooks were written to instruct visitors on how to view the river.
It is only in the furthermost reaches of the book that Ackroyd finds his characteristic literary flow. A section titled Words of the River, in which he explores how writers such as Dickens have described it, is lyrical as well as informative. Similarly, a section titled Thames Art is as poetic as it is factual. But mostly, the reader has the feeling of swimming against the tide.



Thames: The Biography